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“… and the evil done on our behalf.”
on confession, the large nature of sin, and our responsibility
So for those of you who have read me before, you know that I tend to take a larger view, to stand back, to see multiple forces at play.
I would blame part of that on my social work education, which attempts to blend a narrow, individual focus with the ways that groups and systems influence all of us. I would lay the fault for this thinking there, but it was happening before that.
Maybe it was a seminary education exposed me to liberation theology, the type of theology that emerged from oppressed communities in Latin America, the African American experience in the United States, and also in communities in Asia. These ways of thinking about God see the way that God continually chooses the one that appears to be weak, the unlikely (David), the reluctant (Moses and Jonah). God’s activity with the children of Israel was to free them from slavery, from oppression.
Wherever the source, at some point I stopped seeing sin as just something that one did as an individual. Sin was not just the mistakes that I as an individual might make; it was larger, systemic, corporate.
When people would say “We live in a sinful world,” this did not only mean that people commit individual sins, but that…
